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The Health Net Corsair Celebration Day was held at Sikorsky Memorial Airport in Stratford on Monday. Here, a vintage Corsair is given a fly-by as spectators watch, by chief pilot Jim Vocell. Vocell is from the American Air Power Museum in Farmingdale, NY. (Christian Abraham/Connecticut Post) | |
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On Monday, that plane was more than a relic. It was a time machine, propelling Pickering back more than 60 years to an island called Roy Namur somewhere in the South Pacific.
There, he sees Charles Lindbergh, showing him how to take that plane up with 4,000 pounds of bombs strapped to it.
He sees himself standing on the ground watching Nicholas Mainiero heroically land that plane after anti-aircraft fire took out Mainiero's
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Jim Vocell, of the American Air Power Museum in Farmindale, N.Y., is seen in the top photo signaling to have the wheel chocks removed before his flight. | |
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He sees himself flying that plane, maneuvering it on strafing runs as enemy ammunition dumps and troop carriers explode below.
"That plane was vital to us winning the war in the Pacific," said Pickering, now 83 and living in Westport.
That plane was the Corsair, designed by Vought-Sikorsky and later built by Chance-Vought and Goodyear Aircraft. Sixty-six years ago Monday, the first one climbed the skies and altered the war in the Pacific.
"It was fast," Pickering said. "It could dive faster than anything out there."
But to a pilot like himself the key was the three-quarter-inch steel running behind the pilot's head, shoulders and seat.
"No bullets could penetrate it," he said. "The Japanese Zero was light and highly maneuverable but it couldn't take a hit."
The U.S. Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics proposed building the Corsair to United Aircraft on Feb. 1, 1939, according to an article by Earl Swinhart. It included a 2,804-cubic-inch air-cooled radial engine that could deliver 1,850 horsepower, a three-blade, 13-foot-4-inch prop, and bent wings containing .50-caliber machine guns.
Nearly 13,000 of the planes were built before production stopped in 1953.
"This aircraft was unlike anything ever built at the time," said Annette LoSardo of Monroe.
LoSardo was one of America's Rosie the Riveters — the thousands of women who went to work in defense plants while men were shipped off to war.
It was on the assembly line that LoSardo — then a recent high school graduate who moved here from Pennsylvania to work — met her husband, Joseph, then her foreman.
"She won't admit it," said Joseph LoSardo, now almost 90. "But there was a water fountain near my desk. She couldn't take her eyes off of me every time she went for a drink of water."
The pair, now married 62 years, spends much of their time at the Connecticut Air and Space Center, where Joseph is working on rebuilding a Sikorsky S-52 helicopter.
When the pair start talking about the Corsair, Annette believes "nobody had anything that could match it."
So on Monday, pilots like Pickering, Mainiero and James Anderson, 86, of Hamden, and assemblers, like the LoSardos, gathered with more than 100 other Corsair enthusiasts at the Three Wing Flying Services hangar at Sikorsky Memorial Airport to remember and pay tribute to the Corsair — the state's official aircraft.
The program sponsored by Three Wing, HealthNet and the Connecticut Air Museum marked what state Sen. George "Doc" Gunther, R-Stratford, hopes will be an annual Corsair Celebration Day.
"That plane was something else," Gunther said. "It had a kill ratio of 10 to 1."
